Cranberry Relish

Thursday, February 1, 2018

“Cranberry Relish” may sound like a more fitting title for a
food blog than a language blog (or perhaps an advice column by the Pioneer
Woman), but there is punny linguistic explanation behind it.

First I have to explain a couple of technical terms: morpheme, and more specifically, cranberry morpheme.

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest unit that has
meaning.A morpheme can be a whole word,
like cat or run, or it can be part of a word, like the -ing in writing or the un- in unclear.The word unhurriedly is made up of four
morphemes: un-hurry-ed-ly.Each affix adds meaning to the root morpheme hurry, but we also understand their
meanings independent of the word they’re attached to: un- means “not” or “contrary to”; -ed indicates past tense; and -ly
means roughly “in this manner” or “like this.”

A cranberry morpheme is a special type of morpheme that
looks like it should have an independent meaning, but that meaning has been
lost to time.The term is derived from
the cran in cranberry.The meanings of
morphemes in other berry names are fairly straightforward: a blueberry is a
blue berry; a blackberry is a black berry; a straw berry is a berry that grows on
the ground (in the straw).The cran in cranberry looks as though it should follow a similar pattern, but
what is a cran?

The English word cranberry
comes from the German word Kranbeere,
literally “crane-berry.”It may be a
reference to the shape of the flower, which resembles the head and neck of a
crane.The pronunciation difference in
English between cran and crane led to the dissociation of
cranberries from cranes, and the morpheme cran
lost its independent meaning.

The were in werewolf is another fun one.The werewolf myth has existed in western
culture for hundreds of years, and in Old English, wer simply meant “man”—a werewolf was a “man-wolf.”The word wer
has been lost in English, so the morpheme were is now a cranberry morpheme; it no longer has an independent
meaning.Interestingly, though, fantasy
writers have reappropriated it to refer to any person who can shapeshift into
an animal.Charlaine Harris’s Southern
Vampire Mystery series (adapted into the TV series True Blood) features weretigers, werepanthers, and werefoxes, as
well as werewolves.In this way, the cranberry
morpheme were has acquired a new
meaning.

One more of my favorites: the cob in cobweb.As a child, I thought that spider webs and cobwebs
were two different things—that spider webs were made by spiders, but cobwebs
were made of dust.It’s an
understandable mistake, since the word cobweb
doesn’t seem to have anything to do with spiders.Cob
is another cranberry morpheme, its original meaning buried in our language’s long
and complicated history.It comes from the
Old English word for spider: attercoppe,
literally “poison head.”Say “coppeweb”
a few times fast and it quickly turns into “cobweb.”

The second half of the title CranberryRelish is a
play on the double meaning of relish:
a condiment usually made of chopped ingredients, but also enjoyment of or
delight in something.This blog is meant
to, among other things, convey my delight in all things linguistic, cranberry
morphemes included.

I shopped this title among a few friends before I created
the blog.I got consistently negative
feedback, but by then I was too attached to it to consider anything else, so it
stuck.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

When you live in a small city, you come to recognize the vehicles
around you like you come to recognize faces.
I’ve seen some version of this bumper sticker on vehicles at two places
I frequent: my workplace and my gym. The
sticker features the outline of a rifle and the word “infidel” in both English
and (somewhat stylized) Arabic. Each time
I see it, I can’t help but speculate on the message it’s intended to convey and
the audience it’s intended for. In this post
I want to voice some of that speculation.

I was hesitant about writing this because I don’t want to
presume to speak for the people who put this sticker on their trucks, or to put
words in their mouths, or to assume that I can accurately read their intentions
without speaking to them. But at the
same time, this is public speech; it’s a message pasted to the exterior of a
vehicle that moves in public spaces, and it’s clearly meant to convey a message to any who might read it, including
strangers. To put a cryptic sticker on
your car is to invite people to assign a meaning to it. We teach rhetorical analysis—the interpretation
of a public message and its purpose—in my Comp classes as a skill. With that in mind, and acknowledging that I
may be completely misinterpreting the intentions of the vehicle owners, here is
my speculation.

The sticker, as I noted, has both English and Arabic
text. The Arabic text in particular is
odd if one takes it at face value. The
Arabic-speaking population in this area is microscopic; the number of Arabic
speakers who do not also read English is even smaller. The Muslim population in the Black Hills isn’t
even large enough to support one mosque.
The likelihood that a Muslim person who reads Arabic but not English
will see this vehicle and its sticker is tiny.
So while on its face the intended audience appears to be Arabic-speaking
Muslims, in reality, this is unlikely.

Let’s take a moment to consider this point. Pretending that your message is intended for
one audience when it is actually intended for someone else is a kind of message
in itself. Imagine someone at a party,
loudly commenting on some piece of gossip to a group of listeners while secretly
hoping some different group will overhear.
This is essentially what is happening here. The sticker owner purports to be saying, “I’m not a Muslim—in fact, I’m violently opposed
to Islam [assuming that’s the intended message behind the image of the rifle]—and
I want to make sure every Muslim in these here parts knows it.” The sticker owner is actually saying, “I want my majority white English-speaking non-Muslim
neighbors to think that I would tell any Muslim I meet that I’m violently opposed
to Islam.” The context changes the
message in every way that matters. The same
sticker on a vehicle in New York or London would carry completely different
meanings.

Consider also the image of the rifle. It reminds me of similar stickers with text
like “I’d don’t dial 911” and “Keep honking, I’m reloading.” It indicates that the owner is not only
prepared to defend himself with violence, but eager to do so—that he actually hopes
for the opportunity and justification to shoot someone.

Is it true? Does the
owner truly hope for a home invasion or an assault so they have a reason to kill
the offender? Or is it simply a fine
example of alpha male-style posturing?
In some cases it’s probably the former, and in some cases the latter.

The combination of the rifle and the text on this particular
sticker seems to boast that the owner hopes to be attacked—indeed, invites an attack—by an offended Muslim
on the basis of the owner’s infidelity so the owner then has an excuse to kill
that Muslim. One can imagine the owner
daydreaming about just such a situation.

Why is this worth speculating about? We know there’s plenty of anti-Muslim bigotry
and good old-fashioned male aggression in our ether, so who is concerned about
this particular sticker?

It concerns me because it expresses an eagerness for
confrontation that I sometimes see in myself.

Sometimes I imagine being confronted by some hypothetical
individual over some opinion I’ve expressed or contentious statement I’ve made. In my mind, I rehearse how I would respond—the
arguments and facts I’d muster; the sources I’d reference. I even experience the physiological response
when I’m imagining this: my jaw clenches, my face tightens, the acid of anxiety
fills my stomach.

I worry that when I see the eagerness for confrontation that’s
demonstrated in that sticker, it enables me to justify it in myself. It excuses it.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Sam Harris’s work lately,
and it’s gotten me thinking about cognitive resources. The brain is like a rechargeable battery: you
can replenish its power reserves through things like sleep, meditation, and
other things that relax you, but generally speaking, from day to day you only
have so much mental energy to expend. Do
you want to spend it on anger? On
anxiety? On preparing for conflicts that
will probably never happen, planning for disasters that are spectacularly
unlikely?

I’d rather spend it thinking about my creative work, mulling
over interesting things I’ve read or listened to lately, and remembering the
people, animals, and things that bring me joy.
I think we should be careful that we don’t allow the behavior or
mentality of others to influence us disproportionately; that we don’t become
the anger and the confrontation that we condemn in others.

When I see that sticker again, I will remind myself that I’m
not obligated to spend any cognitive resources worrying about who its owner is or what they’re trying to say.

I invite your commentary on this topic. If you have something to add, or think I’ve
drastically misinterpreted this message, please comment below.

Friday, October 6, 2017

Though “epic” may be the technically correct term (in that
it is Homeric in its scope), the word does not do justice to Gore Vidal’s
spectacular and monumental novel Creation. Set primarily in ancient Persia during the
reigns of Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes, Creation
combines the scale and vision of Homer’s Odyssey
with the intimacy of Pearl S. Buck’s The
Good Earth. The narrative is
presented as the autobiography of Cyrus Spitama, half-Persian, half-Greek, grandson
of the prophet Zoroaster and bosom friend of the Crown Prince and future Great
King, Xerxes. It spans his long life,
from his birth in a Zoroastrian cult, through his entry into the Persian court,
his ambassadorships to India, China, and Greece, and finally his death at
seventy-five.

Classical literature often has a distinctly foreign feel,
but Vidal makes the ancient world seem real and near as few authors have done. He writes not as a modern man looking at this
2500-year-old culture through a modern lens, but as a Persian noble for whom
this setting was modern. Cyrus is unburdened by the baggage of Western
cultural norms and Vidal’s knowledge of future history, giving the reader the
distinct and rare sensation of exploring the ancient world as a native, rather
than a tourist.

During his travels, Cyrus meets figures such as the Buddha, Confucius,
Lao Tsu, and Socrates (he doesn’t find the latter particularly impressive); he
visits the hanging gardens of Babylon, where he watches the teenaged Xerxes
seduce an adolescent temple priestess; he is married to a 12-year-old Indian
princess; and he is kidnapped and sold into slavery in China. His journey spans nearly the entirety of the
known world, and he reflects on each adventure with a mix of dry humor, the
detachment that comes with the passing of decades, and the nostalgia of old
age.

Creation is no
light undertaking (my paperback copy is nearly 600 pages of seemingly
microscopic font), yet as I neared its end, I found myself dreading the
inevitable farewell to Cyrus and his devoted stenographer Democritus. Like the end of a long and full vacation in a
foreign country, I wished I had time to see just one more sight, meet just one
more character. Barring that, I plan to
dive deeper into Vidal’s body of work; if his other novels are half as engaging
as Creation, it will be time well
spent.

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Steven Johnson’s How
We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World tells the stories
behind technological developments that impacted the day-to-day lives of
ordinary people in ways so unforeseeable that, in hindsight, they’re almost shocking. The flash bulb, for example—originally
invented to enable photography inside lightless Egyptian tombs—finally gave
journalist Jacob Riis the tool he needed to bring the horrifying conditions of
New York City’s tenement slums into the public eye in a way that words and line
drawings could never do, resulting in sweeping legislative reforms and, according
to Johnson, “ignit[ing] a new tradition of muckraking that would ultimately
improve the working conditions of factory floors too… chang[ing] the map of
urban centers around the world.”

In a similar vein, Johnson shows, the invention of the
printing press and the spread of literacy in the western world brought to light
(somewhat literally) a surprising new problem: the prevalence of
near-sightedness. This led to a sudden
demand for corrective lenses, which in turn prompted a surge in glass- and
lens-making technology, which then rapidly gave rise to both telescopes and
microscopes. During the Renaissance and
the Industrial Revolution, these developments had a profound effect on
scientific discovery, leading to such momentous events as the discovery of
germs and the widespread acceptance of a heliocentric solar system. Gutenberg would never have seen it coming.

Johnson calls these processes the “hummingbird effect,”
noting that when examining the evolution of pollen, almost no one would predict
that it would eventually result in the development of the hummingbird’s wing,
which rotates differently from any other bird’s, allowing it to hover in
mid-air while it feeds on flower nectar.

The stories that Johnson tells in his six densely-packed
chapters are fascinating, well-sourced (the bibliography is stacked with both
primary and secondary sources), and relevant; any modern reader can easily draw
connections between the innovations Johnson explores and their own life. Fans of historical nonfiction or good science
writing will find the book both interesting and informative.

I offer two minor critiques here—one of style, and one of
substance.

Regarding style, though Johnson’s tone is both erudite and
readable, he waxes rather pedantic from time to time. Rather than allowing the reader to speculate
on their own about the implications of a particular point, Johnson prefers to
spell it out for them, occasionally drifting into aphorism. “Ideas trickle out of science, into the flow
of commerce, where they drift into the less predictable eddies of art and
philosophy,” he writes. This sentence is
vague enough that it could be cut and pasted onto practically any page of the
book; it happens to appear in the chapter “Light.” He also tends to repeat his main idea more
often than necessary—the theme of the book is innovations that led to
far-reaching and unpredictable consequences, and he is determined that you
won’t forget it. Also in the chapter
“Light,” he writes, “Here again we see the strange leaps of the hummingbird’s
wing at play in social history, new inventions leading to consequences their
creators never dreamed of.” “Light,”
incidentally, is the final chapter; it would be reasonable for Johnson to
assume that the reader has gotten his point by now.

Regarding substance, Johnson acknowledges in his
introduction that he is focusing exclusively on innovations from North America
and Europe, because, he says, “certain critical experiences—the rise of the
scientific method, industrialization—happened in Europe first, and have now spread across the world.” But this brand of western exceptionalism is
disingenuous. Johnson chose to examine technologies that were
first developed in Europe; to ignore technologies developed in other cultures
and pretend that Europe’s innovations alone were somehow more far-reaching or significant
is myopic and inaccurate. The flash bulb
illuminated New York’s slums and led to worldwide social reform, but the
gunpowder which made the first flash bulb possible was invented in China nearly
a thousand years earlier, and one could just as easily trace those social
reforms back to it, rather than stopping at the flash bulb.

Likewise, BBC writer Tim Harford points out that the
revolution brought on by Gutenberg’s press would have been impossible without
another Chinese invention: paper. And one
could trace these innovations even further back to the development of written
language itself, which was probably invented independently by more than one
culture, including ancient Mesopotamia around 3500 B.C.E. Johnson chooses to focus solely on western
inventions—that’s his prerogative as a writer.
But to imply that western culture is somehow special or ahead of the
curve when it comes to technological innovations that shaped modern life is
misleading.

That said, Johnson endows his narratives with detail,
robustness, and occasionally humor, making How
We Got to Now an engaging, informative, and fun read.

Sunday, August 13, 2017

This is Daniel Brühl.
If you are an American movie-goer, you might know him from his role as
the villain Zemo in Captain America:
Civil War (2016), or as the charming but dangerous Nazi officer in The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017), or as the
charming but dangerous Nazi soldier in Inglourious
Basterds (2009).

On the other hand, if you are a German movie-goer, you
probably know Brühl as the sweet and devoted son in Good Bye Lenin! (2003), or as the ambitious journalist in the
absurdist comedy/drama Me and Kaminski
(2015).

Brühl was born in Spain and grew up in Germany, and though
he speaks six languages fluently, he speaks them all with a German accent. Heroes with German accents are about as
common in American film as unicorns are on the streets of Kansas City—that is
to say, they don’t exist. Brühl might be
handsome, funny, likeable, and talented, but he’s a native speaker of German,
and though his English is flawless, his accent is unmistakable. As a result, he is and probably always will
be the villain in American culture. (This,
of course, despite the fact that Germany is currently one of the U.S.’s
strongest allies.)

In a similar vein, Rob Lowe’s character in Thank You For Smoking (2005) comments
that in modern American movies, the only people who smoke are “the usual
RAVs... Russians, Arabs, and villains.”
This comment is a bit redundant, however, since Russians and Arabs
nearly always are villains in these
films. Lowe’s character should have said
“RAGs”—Russians, Arabs, and Germans—knowing the audience would automatically associate
these groups with movie villains anyway.

The reasons that these groups are still consistently
depicted as evil in American film are myriad and too complex to delve into here. Instead, I want to discuss the potential
effects of these depictions.

Many, perhaps most, modern movie fans would agree that it is
important for both children and adults to see women, people of color, and other
marginalized groups in leadership and hero roles. Wonder
Woman (2017) has been acclaimed partly for this reason. Seeing women exclusively in secondary or
submissive roles; seeing Black men exclusively in predatory or other
stereotypical roles; seeing women of color not represented on the screen at
all—these patterns reinforce implicit biases already instilled in us by our
culture.

The researchers at Project Implicit at Harvard University write that “Implicit preferences for majority groups (e.g., White people) are
likely common because of strong negative associations with Black people in
American society. There is a long
history of racial discrimination in the United States, and Black people are
often portrayed negatively in culture and mass media.”

If negative portrayals of Black people in the media
contribute to implicit biases, then it stands to reason that consistently
negative portrayals of people with specific non-English accents would have a
similar effect. For example, if a large
portion of Americans hear German, Russian, and Arabic accents only or primarily
in the movie theater or in fictional TV series, and those accents belong almost
exclusively to villains, an implicit association is likely to be created and/or
reinforced.

Of course, German and Russian people do not typically
experience serious discrimination or marginalization within American society
(though refugees and other immigrants of Arabic and Middle Eastern descent most
certainly do), so why is this a problem?

Here’s one reason: News outlets and other media typically
use words such as “Russia” and “Germany” as metonyms; for example, “Russia
invaded Crimea.” In this headline,
“Russia” means the Russian military, or might even refer to Putin’s order to
invade; it does not imply that the entire country of Russia moved wholesale
into the Crimean peninsula.

Yet news outlets on all sides—left-leaning, right-leaning,
and centrist—frequently conflate the will of a group of citizens with the
actions of its government, overlooking the obvious fact that not all citizens
(often, not even a majority) agree with those actions. In both mainstream and non-mainstream media, “Russia”
should not be equated with “the
Russian people” or even “the majority of the Russian people,” and yet it
consistently is.

The current rhetoric regarding North Korea provides an even
more poignant example. Americans are
certainly justified in their fears of a nuclear attack, yet commentators across
the board ignore the point that a war between the two countries would have a
far more devastating effect on the citizens of North Korea, who by and large
are pawns and victims of their leader’s sociopathic decision making. When news outlets discuss “North Korea,” they
mean Kim Jong Un and his government; they largely ignore the millions of
powerless citizens who are subject to his whims.

Hollywood encourages American audiences to view other
nations as monoliths—all Germans are Nazis; all Middle Eastern people are
terrorists; all French people are hypersexualized; all Brits are humorless and polite. These stereotypes may not have the same kinds
of immediate, at-home effects as stereotypes about American people of color and
women, but they are two sides of the same coin.
They are tired, outdated tropes that discourage critical thinking and
promote prejudice, discrimination, nationalism, and myopia. If it is healthy to see American women and
people of color in hero and leadership roles, then we should demand the same of
actors with commonly stereotyped nationalities and foreign accents, including
the talented Mr. Brühl.

Friday, May 12, 2017

After my last review, in which I recommended that you opt
for anything written by Gregory Maguire rather than Daniel Levine’s Hyde, I feel a bit hypocritical, because
I found After Alice to be
surprisingly mediocre. In his previous
works, such as the Wicked series and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (his
retelling of the Cinderella tale), Maguire uses well-known stories as
scaffolds, as frameworks, and around them he builds rich and fantastical worlds
with new characters, details, and perspectives that both fit within and enhance
the original narratives. After Alice, on the other hand, is less
an expansion of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland
and Looking Glass and more a
rehashing of them. In it, a second
child, Ada Boyce, follows Alice down the rabbit hole and traces her path
through Wonderland, meeting the same characters and, in some cases, having nearly
the same conversations. Maguire is
successful in imitating Carroll’s absurdist style of dialogue, but there’s very
little that’s original in this portion of the story.

In parallel to Ada’s adventures, we follow the story of Alice’s
older sister, Lydia, as she navigates the separate worlds in and around her
household. While her father entertains a
meeting of intellectuals, including Charles Darwin, Lydia is mostly banished to
the kitchen so as not to disturb the guests.
There she quarrels with the servants and attempts to avoid Ada’s
tiresome governess (who is distraught at having lost track of Ada), while searching
for excuses to speak to one of her father’s guests, a handsome young
American. Lydia’s story is rather more
interesting than Ada’s, primarily because it is more original, and fans of
Maguire’s own dense yet poetic style will enjoy this part of the tale.

Generally speaking, After
Alice is a short and easy read, more homage than reimagining. Serious Maguire or Carroll fans will likely
be disappointed, but those looking for an undemanding fantasy that can be
finished in a summer weekend will find something in it to enjoy.